Tag: American Empire

American Empire’s Military Industrial Complex: Corporate Welfare-Centric

After decades of propping up US military manufacturers (not dissimilar to how the US government propped up canal builder, railroads and steel industries in the 1800s), it is becoming obvious that any industry subsidized this way gets very ineffective and very inefficient while never being innovative. One only has to look at recent super-large military projects like the latest carriers, F-35 and littoral class ships to see that for all the money spent, what the US taxpayer (now and in the future as the debt interest for these expenditures hits) got is of little value.

In his blog post, Andrei Martyanov writes about the F-35:

.. to shoot down F-35 one has to have two different bands radar, good sensor-fusion algorithms and decent signal processing protocols and voila’. S-300 PMU2 Favorit can do this, certainly [the] S-400 [can] ..

This explains why Israel is nervous flying near Syria these days. With customers like India and Turkey now opting for Russian build defense systems, the basic “free-market” economics are finally overriding threats from the US Empire. At the end of the day, these countries want good defense of their nation. This is something that the US has failed to accomplish for itself as it is distracted with the military-industrial complex racket that is in effect a jobs program first and the actual defense of the US is a distant priority.

Andrei goes on to explain what gives Russian military industrial manufacturers the edge:

Unlike American military-industrial complex Russian military-industrial complex is not jobs program or corporate welfare system, it never was.  Allow me to quote myself:
For a nation with such a military history as Russia’s the issue of military technology is an issue of survival. As such, weapons in Russia are sacralized because behind them are generations of Russians who shed blood to make those weapons what they are. They have become a part of the culture to such a degree that commercial considerations take a very distant second place to a main purpose of these weapons—to actually defend the nation. This is absolutely not the case in the United States, with some exception for its Navy, with Americans having no knowledge or recollection of what real war is and what instruments for fighting and winning it are needed. Those things cannot be paid for in money, they are paid for in blood.
I guess this should help explain why Russia is so successful on the international market with her weapons.
At the end of the day, the US now realizes its failed MIC projects at the same time it has alienated both Russia and Chine. Not cool. Too bad Washington DC, Pentagon and Deep State could not grasp Ron Paul’s philosophy that what works around individuals works with nations as well .. good trade (sanction free) promotes peace and prosperity .. and that the “Golden Rule” ( Do unto others as you would have them do unto you ) ain’t just for Christians, or for individual relationships, but nations as well.
Moon of Alabama’s post goes on to extend this demise to the littoral class of ships that the US Navy went all in on:

.. the incompetence of U.S. military design are the Littoral Combat Ships, which are essentially unarmed fast boats. The “stealth” DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyers were supposed to support ground troops with their long range guns. Built at $4 billion a piece the ships are now losing their guns because the ammunition turned out to be too expensive to buy. Before that they lost much of their stealth capabilities because some necessary communication equipment was left out of the original design. The ships new task will be that of a missile launch platform, a job that any commercial ship, carrying containerized Russian missiles (vid), can likewise fulfill.

Epic fails. I could write more about the latest carrier fiasco, but I digress. This is only a symptom of a bigger issues as Ian Walsh in the same post points out:

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but for almost 40 years now America’s elites have treated the US as something to loot, and assumed that the good times would keep rolling. They were uninterested in actually governing. They were happy to move much of America’s core manufacturing overseas, to the most likely nation to replace America as a hegemon, because the Chinese were smart enough to make American elites rich.

So all these short term gains are typical in a democracy. A monarchy is actually one notch better in keeping the long-term in mind.

Alastair Crook extends this demise to the West itself when he was quoted in Moon of Alabama’s post as concluding:

as the post-war élites in America and Europe become more and more desperate to maintain the illusion of being the vanguard of global civilisation, how will they cope with the re-appearance of a ‘civilization-state’ in its own right: i.e. China?

I guess it is time to read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Democracy – The God That Failed“.  This book is pricey ($40), so an alternative is another Hoppe book I have read called “From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy – A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay” is a good read available for $4 (Kindle at Amazon) or a PDF from the Mises Library for FREE!

Placing hope in nations, in militaries and in government leaders is foolish. Time to reflect on family, faith and focusing on the local as the empire slowly dies. Maybe Ron Paul was right on a few things (quote from his book ‘Swords into Plowshares’):

“The people, who far outnumber the would-be dictators, can succeed in a worldwide revolution that fully deprives the dictators of their power. But, any revolt must not lead to just changing the name of the authoritarian system or the political parties in the system. Instead, the revolt must be based on rejecting the trust in government doing the things that only the people can and should do for themselves. This revolt will probably come in stages—in bits and pieces—and be different in the various countries of the world.”
― Ron Paul, Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity

-SF1

West Virginia: How Did It Happen?

Notice that in this June 1861 map, the Confederate States of America are represented in gray. Look closely and you will see a part of Virginia that reaches within 100 miles of Canada almost slitting what is left of the “Union” in two.

If you could look closer you would see the railroad lines that go through that region that connect the east with the west (current Midwest) … and now you start to see how nervous Lincoln was about this area.

Lincoln already had cannon aimed at Dover, DE to prevent that state from considering secession, and in MD Lincoln placed all who were suspected of voting for secession in jail. Dealing with those counties in Virginia that had the railroad lines, coal and timber would take a little bit longer. However, being a new dictator has its privileges.

To know why Virginia seceded, you have to know what happened. The first time Virginia voted, they said NO to secession. Then Lincoln attempted to resupply two southern forts still under his control (Fort Sumter in South Carolina and Fort Pickens in Alabama) there was cannon fire in Charleston Harbor BUT no one was killed. The fort surrendered and then Lincoln called up 75,000 volunteers from all his states (36 minus the 7 that had left the union) to put down an “insurrection” (he took care not to call them states) and he did not fathom the fallout from that fateful decision. Four more states would leave the union with Virginia voting again and this time in favor of leaving. If the reason was to keep slavery, don’t you think the vote would have been the same both times? If it was the high tariffs, the vote should have been the same as well. Maybe, just maybe, these regions did not want to be a colony of another empire yet again!!!

One look at the demographics will reveal a lot about the area south of Wheeling that had ZERO say in what happened next according to quotes below from the Abbeville Institute article from June:

.. In 1860 the mountainous counties of northwestern Virginia cared little about slavery. Even in the southern counties McDowell had 10% slaves, Mercer 150 of a total population of 4500. …. The B & O Railroad, running across northwestern Virginia, provided a vital link between the Yankee states and the West. This explains why the first battle of the War took place at Philippi ‘West’ Virginia…

People generally can tell when the weather is changing .. no different by 1860 when those in western sections of Virginia and the rest of the south saw this:

… western Virginians were horrified by the hijacking of the federal government by Northern industrialists and bankers in 1860. Money had totally bought out the law. A railroad corporate lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, president, swore to defeat the Democratic states even in the North, i.e., New York State, Ohio and the so-called Copperhead states in the West. To the so-called Radical Republicans this was a real civil war. They had to subjugate the Democratic Party representing the workers’ interests. The world was shocked. Even the pope called Lincoln a “tyrant and a usurper” and sent President Jefferson Davis a crown of thorns…

Yes, they sensed what had been coming for several generations, something Patrick Henry prophesied about that rule by a corrupt majority to the north was coming true.

Then, the fallout continued as key US Army personnel had to make some big decisions based on selfish interests OR on principle:

.. General Lee (today called a traitor in the national media) had to resign his commission in the US Army so as not to help subject his native Virginia to the rule of Northern bankers. In the Sound of Music, Captain von Trapp was similarly forced to flee the Nazis…

Since this “Union” that Lincoln professed to keep seemed so very fragile, (actually, it was his party’s inability to hold on to political power indefinitely) it was decided to manufacturer another state for electoral votes needed in 1864 (they admitted Nevada prematurely for the same reason). The method they used is found no where in the Constitution .. but like all things of the Republican party at that time .. you just make things up because the ends justify the means:

.. Just create a “Restored Government of Virginia” in federally controlled areas near Washington. Appoint a governor, Francis Pierpont, and of course an ad hoc legislature. Propose one bill, devoted to the question of secession of the northwestern counties. Vote for it, get paid and go home. Democracy was somewhat crushed, of course. Twenty-two counties did not vote. One county “sent” one representative, some guy who elected himself, etc. But the whole thing worked like a charm, at least in the Union media. The cover-up was well under way. As of June 20, 1863 the federal government declared West Virginia a new state. ..

So even after the war, West Virginia was kept from being part of Virginia again .. politics:

… In legal limbo, ‘West’ Virginia did not democratically or legally secede. Neither was it annexed with any real popular support. Like India as a British colony, our people are seen as second-class citizens, if that. We are berated for our accents and behavior. And we are blamed for a system we did not create. Like the rest of the Confederate states we are in fact a colony…

I contend that except in the big political power centers of major metro areas, the rest of this country is treated as colonies … taxed to feed the federal beast. The American Empire.

Sick I know, but true. Now you know what your high school history teacher forgot to tell you.

-SF1

Did Israel (France, UK, US) Just Overplay Their Hand in Syria?

17SEP2018 Russian MOD Map – Syrian coastline (Red) Russian IL-20 AWACS Surveillance Plane Route (Blue) Israeli F-16 and French naval ship actions

To understand the chess match (yes, leaders of the “free” world are sociopaths who love this “game” that involves other people’s lives) that is being played out on the world’s stage I will be drawing from various sources for this post:

  • Pat Buchanan’s article from Lew Rockwell
  • Moon of Alabama’s article
  • Robert Bridge article from Strategic Culture share on Lew Rockwell

[NOTE: A good researcher pulls from various sources and also thinks critically about the situation at hand before sharing their own thoughts]

From a high level view a few days later it becomes clear that Putin took a lot of heat from those in Syria as well in his own country in not retaliating against the actions of the west in the Mediterranean Sea near Syria this past week. I think of the mechanical operation of a ratchet, using rather small moves one can over time place a lot of torque on a situation IF one is patient and in the end have the upper hand.

Moon of Alabama, who follows the events in the Middle East so very well (I highly recommend a site visit there and IF you feel inclined, please do considering supporting that site) has a great overview of the political milestones that led up to this moment where a Russian propeller plane is accidentally shot down by a Syrian S-200 missile site that was focused on an Israeli F-16 that was shadowing the Russian IL-20 AWACS-like plane. Less than 24 hours prior to this setup:

Turkey and Russia agreed on a further de-escalation in Idelb province in Syria (see the update here). This agreement takes away the chance of an imminent wider war in which the U.S. and some of its allies would use a fake ‘chemical attack’ as a pretext to launch missiles against a large number of Syrian government targets and military positions.

.. peace was about to break out in Syria. However:

A peaceful solution of the Idleb situation is unsatisfying for Israel. The successful Syrian defeat of the Jihadi enemy inside the country would allow Syria and its allies to concentrate their forces against Israel. Israel wants the Syrian government destroyed and the country in chaos.

On Sunday September 16 Israel tried to hit an Iranian Boeing 747 freight plane at Damascus airport. The plane allegedly carried an Iranian copy of the Russian S-300 long range air defense System for the Syrian army.

Imagine any country in this world that can get away with attacking INSIDE another sovereign country and getting away with it. I can only think of two countries, Israel and the United States of America.

On Monday around 10:00pm local time 4 F-16 jets of the Israeli airforce, coming from the sea, launched missiles against at least three targets on Syria’s coast. The strike came only hours after Israel released satellite images of what it called “strategic targets” in Syria. The integrated Syrian and Russian air-defenses responded.

The Israeli air force had warned the Russian forces in Syria only one minute before the strike. A Russian IL-20 electronic warfare airplane (red line) was preparing to land at the Russian airport near Latakia just as the Israeli attack (blue) happened.

Israel chose to give a 60 second warning that could never be enough time for the IL-20 propeller plane to clear out of an area to a safer zone. Israel knew this but wanted to provoke the “Bear” so as not to loose even more strategic ground in the Middle East for their “defense”. Israel has chosen this path, and there will be blowback.

The IL-20 was hit 35 kilometers off the coast by a S-200 air-defense missile fired by the Syrian military towards the Israeli attack. There were 15 Russian soldiers on board of the plane which were likely all killed.

The Israeli attack came out of the same direction as the Russian IL-20. The large 4 propeller plane creates a much bigger radar reflection than the small F-16s fighter jets. The S-200 missiles have a semi-active radar homing seeker. These are passive detectors of a radar signal which is provided by an external source, in this case the Syrian and Russian radars on the ground. While the missile was aimed at the F-16 its seeker likely mistook the larger radar reflection of IL-20 for the intended target.

At the same time as the Israeli air force attacked, a Russian frigate (red) near the coast detected missile launches from the French Frigate Auvergne (blue) nearby. The French frigate carries air, ship and land attack missiles.

With so many Russian ships in the area plus Russian and Syrian radar sites on the mainland in Syria, there is plenty of evidence untainted by spin by Western powers to twist. Similar to Lincoln’s provocation at Ft. Sumter and FDR’s provocation of the Japanese before Pearl Harbor and even Bush I’s green light to Saddam in Kuwait at the start of Gulf War I, this was a blatant attempt at provoking conflict in the midst of the last two years of Russian accusations (election meddling) and US sanctions.

Sure the bully (Israel) “apologized” but said “it was not our missile”. Whatever. There is ZERO honor in that and there was no US response that indicated any kind of remorse at all.

The honor (again) came from “Cool Hand” Putin. As Robert Bridge points out:

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, took admirable efforts to prevent the blame game from reaching the boiling point, telling reporters that the downing of the Russian aircraft was the result of “a chain of tragic circumstances, because the Israeli plane didn’t shoot down our jet.”

Nevertheless, following this extremely tempered and reserved remark, Putin vowed that Russia would take extra precautions to protect its troops in Syria, saying these will be “the steps that everyone will notice.”

Now there is much consternation in Israel that the IDF will soon find its freedom to conduct operations against targets in Syria greatly impaired. That’s because Russia, having just suffered a ‘friendly-fire’ incident from its own antiquated S-200 system, may now be more open to the idea of providing Syria with the more advanced S-300 air-defense system.

.. or even the highly advanced S-400 systems:

The Israeli gamble did NOT pay off. Their reputation as a greedy neighbor who steals and maims others in the ‘hood all the while not adhering to international law that it demands others to follow. (While having 200+ nukes in their back pocket) The Russians know this and are being very patient in protecting a friend that asked for assistance back in 2015.

In summary, Pat Buchanan does a masterful job at giving a grand overview that spans decades of political ebb and flow on a global scale when he states:

By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And how have we husbanded the fruits of our Cold War triumph?

This month, China’s leader-for-life Xi Jinping stood beside Vladimir Putin as 3,000 Chinese troops maneuvered with 300,000 Russians, 1,000 planes and 900 tanks in Moscow’s largest military exercise in 40 years.

An uncoded message to the West from the East. Richard Nixon’s great achievement in bringing Peking in from the cold, and Reagan’s great achievement of ending the Cold War, are history.

Squandered. The “shining city on a hill” and “American Exceptionalism” are but a myth. The real DNA of our government along with that of Israel and NATO aligned countries are bent on war. Pat continues:

.. Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO’s quick march to Russia’s ancient frontiers, is alive and well. Russia appears to have given up on the West and accepted that its hopes for better times with President Donald Trump are not to be.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is berating Russia for secretly trading with North Korea in violation of U.N. sanctions, saying, “Lying, cheating, and rogue behavior have become the new norm of the Russian culture.” Cold wars don’t get much colder than defaming another country’s culture as morally debased.

The U.S. has also signaled that it may start supplying naval and anti-aircraft weaponry to Ukraine, as Russia is being warned to cease its inspections of ships passing from the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov. The three-mile-wide strait lies between Crimea and Kerch Peninsula. In Russia’s eyes, both banks of the strait are Russian national territory.

With U.S. backing, Ukraine has decided to build a naval base on the Sea of Azov to “create conditions for rebuffing the aggressive actions of the Russian Federation in this region.”

Kiev has several patrol boats in the Sea of Azov, with a few more to be transferred there in coming months. Russia’s navy could sink those boats and wipe out that base in minutes. Are we going to send our Navy across the Black Sea to protect Ukraine’s naval rights inside a sea that has been as historically Russian as the Chesapeake Bay is historically American? ..

This is the height of American Empire stupidity. It is what Thomas Jefferson feared centuries ago that the United States arrogance may lead to:

Trade is honorable. Political solutions that promote peace is honorable.

The American Empire is not (nor has it been since the end of WWII) honorable. You can’t fix this, you can’t drain the swamp enough BUT you can research for yourself the reality of today’s political world and it does impact you, indirectly maybe, but it will eventually touch you or your kid’s lives. Not unlike the Roman Empire, this empire is entering its last days and only God knows the months or years this will take.

Be prepared

-SF1

Iran: Misunderstood If One Only Listens to US Government/US Media

USS Kidd (DDG-993), the never-delivered IIS Kouroush, to be part of the Shah’s upgraded Iranian Navy

Reflecting back on the late 1970s when I was an instructor in the US Navy’s Naval Training Center, it was apparent that I was more than just a little intrigued by some of the nationalities represented. I taught Aussies (quite the drinkers) and Germans (2nd place drinkers) as well as Saudis, Iraqis and Iranians. It was the Iranians I was the most curious about especially when it seemed at one moment Iran was the US’s closest ally and then during the “Hostage Crisis” broke out in November 1979, they were becoming our worst enemy.

In hindsight, with a little research and education it is apparent that the Shah’s policies did little to advance the Iranian people as the Iranian military was not ready to use these advanced US built navy warships without outside technical help. The situation was not helped by the woeful state of Iranian society which in the 1970s it was still 40%+ illiterate and it had an acute shortage of engineers and electronics technicians, let alone ones who wanted to join the navy. I had seen this first hand in teaching Iranians about radar systems.

Most people who remember 1979 saw what those in power wanted us to see. Few people at that time understood the path the Iranian people had up to that point. As David Swanson points out in this Lew Rockwell article back in 2013 about what the US public was fed:

[Myth follows]

U.S.-Iranian relations began around November 1979 when a crowd of irrational religious nutcases violently seized the U.S. embassy in Iran, took the employees hostage, tortured them, and held them until scared into freeing them by the arrival of a new sheriff in Washington, a man named Ronald Reagan.

From that day to this, according to this popular theory, Iran has been run by a bunch of subhuman lunatics with whom rational people couldn’t really talk if they wanted to. These monsters only understand force. And they have been moments away from developing and using nuclear weapons against us for decades now.

However, if the truth be told (just know that it was in 2013 when the CIA finally admitted to this):

[Truth follows]

… the CIA, operating out of that U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1953, maliciously and illegally overthrew a relatively democratic and liberal parliamentary government, and with it the 1951 Time magazine man of the year Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, because Mossadegh insisted that Iran’s oil wealth enrich Iranians rather than foreign corporations.

The CIA installed a dictatorship run by the Shah of Iran who quickly became a major source of profits for U.S. weapons makers, and his nation a testing ground for surveillance techniques and human rights abuses. The U.S. government encouraged the Shah’s development of a nuclear energy program. But the Shah impoverished and alienated the people of Iran, including hundreds of thousands educated abroad.

We are talking about a beta test of the NSA called SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, back in the 1970s. So embedded was this surveillance network, that the CIA was able to transition Iran from the Shah’s regime to an equally abusive on based on a theocracy without hardly anyone in media seeing anything strange at all.

A secular pro-democracy revolution nonviolently overthrew the Shah in January 1979, but it was a revolution without a leader or a plan for governing. It was co-opted by rightwing religious forces led by a man who pretended briefly to favor democratic reform. The U.S. government, operating out of the same embassy despised by many in Iran since 1953, explored possible means of keeping the Shah in power, but some in the CIA worked to facilitate what they saw as the second best option: a theocracy that would substitute religious fanaticism and oppression for populist and nationalist demands.

When the U.S. embassy was taken over by an unarmed crowd the next November, immediately following the public announcement of the Shah’s arrival in the United States, and with fears of another U.S.-led coup widespread in Tehran, a sit-in planned for two or three days was co-opted, as the whole revolution had been, by mullahs with connections to the CIA and an extremely anti-democratic agenda.

They later made a deal with U.S. Republicans, as Robert Parry and others have well documented, to keep the hostage crisis going until Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s government secretly renewed weapons sales to the new Iranian dictatorship despite its public anti-American stance and with no more concern for its religious fervor than for that of future al Qaeda leaders who would spend the 1980s fighting the Soviets with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan. At the same time, the Reagan administration made similarly profitable deals with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, which had launched a war on Iran and continued it with U.S. support through the length of the Reagan presidency…

So you see, Iran was once again used and abused by a super power like it had been before by the British and BP which profited from the immense oil discoveries from 1908 through 1953 when it enlisted the CIA to get the Shah of Iran back in power. Back in the 1800s it was Iran’s weak and greedy monarchs who where all too ready to hand over their country’s riches to the country, usually Britain or Russia, that had the deepest pockets with little regard for the well being of their subjects. These corrupt rulers, more than any other internal factor, set the stage for the violent struggle the Iranians waged for freedom, democracy, and national sovereignty throughout the first half of the 20th century.

You see, there are bits of truth out there but you will not see it in the best sellers sections of bookstores or in your history books. One recommended read is the yet to be published “Waking Up in Tehran: Love and Intrigue in Revolutionary Iran“, which is the memoir of Margot White, an American human rights activist who became an ally of pro-democracy Iranian student groups in 1977, traveled to Iran, supported the revolution, met with the hostage-takers in the embassy .. which in fact was an early version of WikiLeaks. They “continued to publish reconstructed US Embassy documents, eventually producing 54 volumes of evidence of CIA operatives … manipulating, threatening and bribing world leaders, rigging foreign elections, hijacking local political systems, shuffling foreign governments like decks of cards, sabotaging economic competitors, assassinating regional, national and tribal leaders at will, choreographing state-to-state diplomacy like cheap theater.” [ Facebook page link to this book here ]

This book, promised for the past five years, could unlock even more information about the Deep State. Maybe this is why this book has yet to be published?

In the meantime I encourage you to check out The Corbett Report article back in June 2016 which states:

It’s been an open secret that the US organized and enabled two of the three major events in modern Iranian history: the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and the Shah’s subsequent reign of terror (and eventual exile)…. newly-released documents confirm that the US had a larger role than previously admitted in the third: the Islamic Revolution of 1979

-SF1

 

Prophets: Ignored and Marginalized .. Every Time

Anyone who has studied the Bible knows that the prophets (not “forth-telling” as in future telling, but “truth-telling”) were routinely seen as strange old men who reside on the edge of crazy and are in fact marginalized or worse, killed. From Noah, Moses and Samuel in the Old Testament to John the Baptist, Jesus, John and Paul in the New Testament, there was usually some tragic period in their life and also some truth-telling that usually had the masses turn away from following them.

Here is a modern day prophet whose message of peace was not well received but he did live until age 94. His name at birth in Germany was Helmut Osterman, born into a prosperous Jewish family in 1922 hear Hanover. His family saw the rise to power of the Nazis and in 1933 moved to Palestine. This 11-year old changed his name to the Hebrew, Uri Avnery.

Eric Margolis, in his Lew Rockwell article today, outlines Uri’s trajectory and allegience as well as his shift in his vision for the future of Israel:

In 1948, the young Avnery joined the underground Jewish guerilla force Irgun, fighting British and Palestinians and, later, Arab regular soldiers. Irgun committed numerous notorious terrorist acts and massacres that played a key role in driving the Palestinian population from their ancestral homes. He was seriously wounded and nearly died. Two years later, he and three friends started a political magazine, “One World.” Avnery was increasingly political and sided with Israeli expansionists.

As with a lot of prophets, there is a period where one’s belief structure is based in the traditional view and they are usually very passionate about it. (i.e. Saul, the best of the Jewish Pharisees, with a resume that is top-notch)

But then one day, or in a series of days, there is a stirring in the heart that something is not right, and that there is a better, although even non-traditional preferred way toward a future that aligns better with nature and its God:

… he gradually came to see that peace and cooperation was the only solution for Israel. After Israel’s smashing victories over the Arabs in the 1956 and 1967 wars, he formed a leftist pro-peace party and won a seat in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. He helped found the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Council and the renowned Gush Shalom peace movement.

Avnery was one of the first Israelis to call for fair treatment of the Palestinians, over a million who had become refugees in 1948 and 1967. He urged Israel to sign a lasting peace accord with the Palestinians and return to them control of the West Bank, the old city of Jerusalem, Golan and Gaza – all occupied by the Israeli Army and growing waves of Jewish settlers.

It is a tough road to hoe when one is a pioneer in new thoughts that would help propagate the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you).

Uri became the target of decades of hatred by right-wing Israelis. He was stabbed. He said things that were not said in public. He kept reminding Israelis that their Jewish ethics demanded fair and decent treatment of Palestinians, whom Israeli leaders preferred to call ‘cockroaches’ and ‘wild animals.’

Yes, but in spite of the attacks (and the truth that when one is on target, one will take on a lot of flak!), Uri continued to share what would be best for all people groups in the region for a peaceful future (something that had been maintained in various areas of the Middle East over the past few centuries, like Syria, Lebanon and even in Iran)

There would never be peace in the region, warned prophet Avnery, until Israel returned at least some land taken from Palestinians, and created a viable Palestinian state with full democratic rights and freedoms … Never one to mince words, Uri called Israel’s right, which just enacted a law making Israel an exclusively Jewish state (thus excluding its 21% Muslim and Christian population) ‘semi-fascist Jews.’

Uri’s dreams seem like they will never come true. He was passionate about a path forward but has found resistance in BOTH Israel and in Washington DC / American Empire:

Avnery became fast friends with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The two leaders could have created a viable Jewish-Arab state or federation. Sadly, Arafat was probably murdered and Avnery politically sidelined. In fact, Israel’s entire pro-peace left has dwindled to a fringe movement, isolated by its right-wing governments and Washington. Days after Uri died, Israel’s Likud coalition announced the expropriation of more Arab land on the West Bank to build 1,000 new homes for Jewish settlers.

As it is with prophets, years later people will find wisdom in the story of their life that may inspire them in another time and place in this world. Until then, it is important to share stories of people like this to give the next generations hope as well as to help them identify prophets in their midst, and take note.

SF1